Title: I'll be there for youFandom: Pit Bulls and ParoleesSong: I'll Be There For You - The RembrantsLength: 3:03Contains: no standard content notes apply. Animal harm: clips in this vid depict the aftermath of animal harm, primarily via neglect; a few dogs also have visible injuries. There are no clips of anyone abusing an animal.Summary: "It's for more than three hundred pitbulls, the world's most misunderstood breed of dog; it's for parolees, the guys I hire because no one else will."

Hi! I am really excited about festivids, and I'm thrilled that you're making a vid in one of these tiny (or at least small) fandoms that we share! First and foremost, I want you to have fun and do festivids however you want to do it, and if that means totally ignoring this that is fine by me. If you want more information about me or what I like about the sources or music suggestions, read on, but don't take any of this letter as a strict guideline - I like all kinds of vids (including critiques) and I like surprises and I like these sources, so you're pretty sure to make something I'll like.

I'm fine with any rating - one of my requests is for a porn source, and a vid for that could be as porny as you want. And I'm fine with almost any content; the only exceptions are that I'm phobic about needles and sometimes bothered by lingering shots of needles in flesh and that I really hate celluloid closeting and dead queer people narratives (not that you're likely to hit those with these sources).

Hi! I am really excited about festivids, and I'm thrilled that you're making me a present in one of these tiny (or at least small) fandoms that we share! First and foremost, I want you to have fun and do festivids however you want to do it, and if that means totally ignoring this that is fine by me. If you want more information about me or what I like about the sources or music suggestions, read on, but don't take any of this letter as a strict guideline - I like all kinds of vids (including critiques) and I like surprises and I like these sources, so you're pretty sure to make something I'll like.

I'm fine with almost any rating or content - the only thing is that I'm phobic about needles, but I can usually watch them unless it's an extended slow-mo sequence.

Almost everything I requested is a safety fandom, so if you're panicking about what you matched on there are plenty of easy-to-ahem options!

It's a fanwork exchange for fandoms by chromatic creators featuring chromatic characters/people - there's more info in the official announcement post. And it's for all kinds of fanworks, vids and fic and art and icons and picspams and etc.

The good: I love a fanwork exchange! I love making something especially for someone else and getting something made especially for me. And I love the mods and the concept behind the exchange. And I really do need external pressure of some sort to actually post anything.

The bad: The schedule overlaps a lot with kink_bingo's schedule - all of the busiest KB modding times are also the important kaleidoscope times. But that won't mean I'll have no free time! But it probably will mean that I'm cranky and kind of tired of fannish things. It might feel more irritating than fun when I'm looking at an assignment next month. So I don't know.

The difficult: Nominations! People only get to nominate three fandoms, and there are so many cool things not currently on the list, and how would I decide what I want to nominate. I haven't been thinking about doing any multi-fandom exchanges, so I don't have a ticky-able list of Cool Things I Would Nominate For X. It's all just exclamation marks. Sleep Dealer! I want fanworks in that universe so much! Especially if they contain cool speculative fiction or threesomes! Janelle Monáe's Metropolis/Archandroid universe! All the Samuel Delany, all of it! (Except I still haven't read Dhalgren, whoops.) Game fandoms! Whale Rider, which I asked for for yuletide one year, but maybe glass_icarus is going to nominate it! Etc.

I should've written it before I was born, but I just - omg, I can't believe I just watched that.

So someone linked to this show that I'd seen in reruns and had really liked when I was ten - The Fantastic Journey. Basically it is an extremely low-budget 1977 scifi tv show in which the Bermuda triangle is a collapsed space-time-whatever with lots of bands of different times. Our heroes are trying to get back to their own times and out of said Bermuda Triangle without being killed by random sixteenth century English naval dudes or twenty-second century androids. As a consequence, there is hilarious fighting, and hilarious pseudo-time-travel, and hilarious future-dudes (Varian, who travels with them, is from the future, when there are no nations and everyone is a pacifist and doctors use music to heal people) and hilarious low-budget psychic ladies (Liana, who is an alien AND from the future, has a psychic relationship with her cat which mostly involves picking it up and staring intently into its face and cuts to close-up cat face in which the cat is blinking).

Anyway! I thought I'd snag some of it and watch it nostalgically and facepalm at my younger self, who totally had a crush on Varian and his deep v-neck shirts. The copies that I have are off of VHS from the circa-1992 scifi channel, without the commercials edited out, so it's basically 100% my childhood experience of watching the show. (Omni and Psychic Hotline commercials! Yeesh.)

For my birthday this past weekend, I got the flu. Now I am achey and tired and cranky and fever-and-chills-y and hard-to-focus-y and I can't read fic and I screwed up the decreases in my knitting like twelve times yesterday because I couldn't count.

So I thought it was time to post a guessing-fannish-stuff meme!

Some months ago, aria posted a bunch of post secret-style secrets from the POV of various characters, and asked people to guess who wrote which secret. At the time I thought it was a great idea, and wanted to turn it into a meme (again), but then it took me a long time to make any secrets, and also to come up with secrets, and anyway I'm bad at getting around to posting things, so I just stuck them over in posts-to-maybe-make-someday. But today is clearly a good day for it!

ETA: There are two secrets left unguessed (counting the ones where someone made an awesome guess, but nobody guessed what I'd originally intended): #7 and 41. So I thought I'd narrow down the fandoms somewhat; the remaining ones come from: Stargate SG-1 and Nintendo video games.

Attention Please, Paprika. PRETTY. I don't know what's going on at all, but I think that's part of the point. And the editing is really great, and uses the music really beautifully, and the whole vid has this cool hallucinatory quality.

Illumination, Joseon X-Files. Wow, this is completely gorgeous and atmospheric and ...oddly creepy, maybe? I love the way the vidder used movement of light and shadow, and the music is a great choice. I have never seen this show but clearly I must!

Space Oddity, Community. This is a really sweet Abed/Troy vid about their shared geekery, awwww. Their love of spaceships brings them closer together!

They Want More, Jurassic Park. I can't believe I forgot to rec this the other day, because it made me laugh and laugh. Dinosaur pov ftw.

Truth Is in the Dirt, V (2009). Oh, Erika Evans, ILU! This vid draws some interesting parallels between Erika and Anna, and uses the song and the atmospheric footage to great effect.

2. In knitting-related news, if you're going to drop a stitch, should you do it a) while doing some nice 2x2 ribbing, b) while setting up your short rows, or c) immediately after knitting your two stacked short row stitches? Yeah, I picked option c, who the hell even knows where these loops go. *rips back like twenty rows*

3. I was really sick of accidentally clicking on links that people had written to include hxxp (which some people do to anonymize links) so I installed a greasemonkey script to change hxxp to http. Then I realized that I was not respecting people's desire for anonymity and not incidentally was breaking the rules of some communities and forums, so I edited the script to change the hxxps to working anonym.to links instead. If you'd like to do the same thing, ( instructions for making an anonym.to redirect )

And now I am clicking on those links with ease. *is so lazy*

4. I am excited to see the permanent style=mine and style=site options (described in the latest news post), but reading people's comments about both options always reminds me that neither option is perfect for me. I often turn custom comment pages on not because I like the style or worked hard on it or anything, but because I want the sidebar or header (tags and links and etc) to be available on entry pages; I usually prefer to read in the site style. And especially in communities, if the entry page is in the site style, there's no obvious place to click for the rules or tags, which often leads to a lot of questions that are a pain in the ass ("where can I find ..." "but do you ..." "if I want to sign up ..."), or posts that don't follow the posting templates or rules or whatever. So I am still torn about site style versus custom comment pages.

5. Aren't these pantone-chip cookies pretty much the coolest thing ever? I love that she just mixed up colored icing and then matched it to a pantone color after it cooled.

7. And only loosely related to food, Happy New Year to everyone who celebrates! At the moment I am all eeee white_lotus Lunar New Year Exchange eeee. The fanworks are SO GREAT GUYS, I am so glad to be posting them now where other people can see them. I have been so caught up in the excitement that I have even tried to make some treats, but I keep being interrupted by spreadsheets.

I have watched several of them already, mostly in the genres of "scifi" "queer film" and "films with people of color." Here are some that I particularly liked:

O Death, Book of Eli. I haven't seen the movie at all -- basically all I know about it is that it's a post-apocalypse -- but wow, this vid is GORGEOUS. And it really makes clever use of the quiet movement in the song, so that it ends up using these neat restrained rhythms. Plus did I mention the part where it's gorgeous?

After All, Sarah Jane Adventures. This totally made me tear up a little. It's a Sarah Jane vid about her whole life, so there's some Old Who and some New Who and a whole bunch of SJA and it is basically everything I want in a vid about Sarah Jane. <3

Who Needs Enemies, ST: DS9. This is really interesting and pretty, and I'm not really sure I got the whole story in it, but the Bashir + Sloan + Garak, and the performance and watching-your-own-life and spy stuff, is all really deftly handled. And dense. Definitely dense. It makes me wish I remembered more about those plots.

End of the World, Life After People. It's not quite my genre, but it's sort of a (post-)apocalypse vid regardless. And it does really cool things with time-lapse and tight cutting and with collapse and destruction. I really enjoyed it. (Note: rotting food, maggots, insects, etc.)

Beat Control, Lilo and Stitch. It's like pure joy! With lots of dancing and hugs and family!

The Humbling River, Red Cliff. I really enjoyed the vid -- it's beautiful, and I like the editing a lot, and like the character-focuses, and I <3 Zhuge Liang like whoah. But I'm not a fan of the song choice, so I end up feeling a little torn about it.

Anywhere On This Road, Jericho. I have never seen the show at all, so I'm sure I'm missing a ton of layers in this vid -- I actually just clicked on it because I like the singer (Lhasa de Sela). And wow, it's a really great post-apocalypse vid, and the song gives it this feeling of inevitability and tension at the same time. Very cool.

Now I will go poke at more festivids! Or do some knitting, one of those two things.

1. Okay you guys, I need HELP. Where is the Avatar: tLA fanfic? I have checked out the AO3, and the old yuletide archive, and some of the multifandom reccers I know, but I have found very little. There must be some post-series worldbuilding fic, right? Surely?

2. I watched the Man from UNCLE episode that guest stars Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner the other day, and let me just say: n'awwww. It's a first season episode (The Project Strigas Affair), so it predates Star Trek and is in black and white and is totally about pulling a giant con and they barely encounter each other in the course of the episode but it still made me go "awww." (Especially because I am pro giant cons and Ilya undercover in awesome moustaches.) Anyway, if you're in a nostalgic mood (and are willing to put up with some really heavy-handed eastern European stereotypes) it's pretty amusing. William Shatner plays the innocent young chemical engineer turned exterminator! Leonard Nimoy smokes cigarettes with a holder and does expansive arm gestures!

3. I'm kind of weirded out by the fact that basically all the tv I'm looking forward to is on a summer-airing schedule --Mad Men, White Collar, Leverage, Psych as long as someone prescreens the episodes for embarrassment squick -- and that none of it includes spaceships. I mean, there are three whole cop/con comedy-dramas on that list, geez. Could I get just a little spaceship?

Anyway, if you've been watching a neat speculative fiction tv show, or are looking forward to a new one, I'd love a rec. Especially if it includes women and characters of color and queer people who also have cool powers/are on the spaceship/do neat things/aren't the backup, the love interest, or the funny neighbor. I'm told that I have to start watching Fringe, among other things.

So I was thinking about the kink_bingo mini-challenge for this month as I was editing the kink wiki and putting in examples. And then I thought, wow, actually, I can think of a whole bunch of characters who dressed up in fursuits orfeather-suits! I should make an iconset of them to demonstrate how prevalent it is! So then I did.

There are 32 35 icons (thanks sabinetzin!) of people in fur/feathersuits under the cut: Mythbusters, Life on Mars, Boston Legal, Buffy, Middleman, Gravitation, and Farscape.

3. I actually kind of feel like I'm posting all the time right now, because I'm writing up kink_bingo related stuff: resources, posting template, accessability, kink wiki stuff about kinks X and Y and Z. But then I don't post it! Because it has to wait until round two is closed! So I keep being a little confused about what I've posted and where. *facepalm*

4. I'm sort of doing three weeks for dreamwidth all the time, since I'm not crossposting, but I thought this related meme was interesting: What kind of topics/entries would you like to see me posting about? Any particular questions you've always wanted to ask me but have resisted because the answer would be a huge essay? Ever want to wind me up and watch me go on a particular topic? Anything you've heard me say "I should write that entry about _________ I've been meaning to write" and have been patiently waiting for? (from telesilla)

Thanks for offering to write one of my tiny fandoms! These are all fandoms of my heart; I love them, and I love the characters I asked for, so I would pretty much be happy with anything about them. I want you to have fun writing, and not feel too stressed out by what you think I want -- I want you to be only as stressed as you'd like to be :)

If you're the kind of writer who wants more specifics in a request, I've put some things I like and don't like ( below this cut )

... yes. Seriously. I was maaaaaybe a little yuletide!obsessed at the time.

Also I said that I wanted Eddie Izzard fic. "Eddie Izzard/Steve, on the moon." Per this email to myself, I contemplated Eddie Izzard/The President of Burundi. I am now thinking about asking for some sort of Eddie Izzard fic. I nominated it, anyway. And I wasn't even thinking about it three days ago! This is how I am with yuletide nominations -- I change my mind constantly.

All of which is to say, hurrah for yuletide nominations! I nominated fandoms a couple hours ago, but I totally just went back and changed them -- I realized that nobody had nominated Super Mario Galaxy. I hope someone asks for creepy Freudian Cosmic!Mario fic, or intriguingly kinky Star Bunny fic, or adorable Toad Brigade orgy fic.

***

thingswithwings and I baked a pumpkin pie a couple days ago. (Substitution: all whipping cream instead of half milk, 3/4 cup of honey for a single recipe). Last week, I made muffins! This means two things: first, that it's fall, and I'm happy to have the oven on; and second, that this is really our apartment now. Pie is the official inauguration of an apartment!

Also, it's really tasty pie. We made a recipe and a half, because that was the size of the pumpkin, so now we have pumpkin tartlets too. I totally had a slice of pumpkin pie for first breakfast yesterday. YUM.

(Between the pumpkin pie and the hum of the radiators, you can tell it's fall here. We just gave in and turned the heat on, but to be fair to us it was 58* inside before we caved. And it was COLD.)

***

Also I would like to rec isagel's new Touching Evil vid, Wither and Die. I know next to nothing about the series, but I the vid is gorgeous and interesting and sort of heart-clenchy even without the context.

1. So, you may think that the conservatives who miss the satire in Stephen Colbert are largely apocryphal, or that there can't possibly be many of them, because seriously, who could think that his speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner was supposed to be in praise of Bush? Well, three scientists at Ohio State University have done some research, and they looked at the reactions of 332 undergrads, and discovered that in point of fact there's a pretty significant correlation between identifying as "conservative" and feeling that Colbert is only pretending to be joking. And, interestingly, both conservatives and liberals say that Colbert is funny, but interpret the direction of the humor totally differently. ANYWAY, I have the pdf of this article -- it's on sendspace here.

2. If you like playing with color schemes, I find kuler kind of fun -- it's a bunch of created color schemes with handy RGB CMYK and hex codes attached, so you can play with color and find combinations of five pinks that are in the same tonal range. If, like me, you are hugely lazy, this is AWESOME.

3. If, like me, you are hugely lazy part II: red alt's I Like Your Colors application, which pulls hex codes for colors from html and css pages and groups them by value. If you look at my journal layout, in fact, and find the colors familiar, that's because I dug out the Celerity css page and popped it into the application -- I'm not thrilled by it, but they're soothing greens, and I was in a hurry trying to make it less orange and blue.

4. I had to pay for my new dw account by check, because paypal timed out on me a bunch of times and I gave up, which means I have only six icons! Until they get my check! This is sad and wrong.

I found a new fandom when I was watching yuletide stuff. Well, I found a lot of new fandoms, but this one is important and I must share it with you.

Below, you will find a song from the movie Sholay. The song features Jai and Veeru, two thieves who love each other and run around stealing things for fun. The song is just -- so perfect, it cheers me up when I am sad. I can watch it over and over and over.

Jai and Veeru love each other! They ride through the countryside together! They are best friends forever! THEY ARE NOT TWO! I love them so much.

I may have *cough* clipped the whole scene to high-quality avi because it makes me so happy, so if you'd also like to have something to cheer you up when you're down, drop me a line at eruthros at livejournal dot com.

PS: the movie has a sad ending. If you're bad at sad endings, and thinking of watching the movie, let me know and I'll spoil you.

PPS: the only thing that made me sad about putting Sholay in the vid was that The Motorcycle Diaries isn't a yuletide fandom, because Sholay and the Motorcycle Diaries would have looked so pretty together.